Reviews

Louise Bourgeois: the Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine

A remarkable and ambitious documentary

By GERALD PEARY | November 4, 2008

3.5 Stars

It took two brave and persistent filmmakers, Amei Wallach and Marion Cajori, to break through the still-imposing façade of sculptor Louise Bourgeois, now 96, and get her to relax a bit and offer her remarkable story. What we learn, in intimate conversations at her Brooklyn studio, is that she remains furious, 80 years later, that her father in France took a mistress in front of her mother. And she’s still hurt that her insensitive père would carve a tangerine at the dinner table and compare the fruit’s beauty to his young daughter’s ugliness. “My emotions are my demons,” Bourgeois confesses, then states that her wounds from childhood motivated a half-century of extraordinary personal art on the cusp of modernism and post-modernism, often about being female and the imprisoned body. This ambitious documentary has been in the making since 1992; Marion Cajori died of cancer in 2006, before it was finished. 99 minutes | MFA : November 6, 8, 13, 20, 21, 23, 28, 30

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[ 05/26 ] "A Natural Order," photographs by Lucas Foglia @ David Winton Bell Gallery

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[ 05/26 ] "2012 RISD Graduate Thesis Exhibition" @ Rhode Island Convention Center

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